It was around this time two years ago that I had begun wondering about a collaborative learning game that might involve role-playing and task completion. I suggested that the game shouldn’t preach, correct, or in any way disrespect the player’s intelligence, but rather amplify it through teaching the art of content analysis as a form of “participatory entertainment”. I was learning content analysis at the time with Open Intelligence, but lacked the tools that would accelerate the process. I was longing for something that didn’t exist and was wishing for a form of education that could provide the kind of collective intelligence I saw attainable when collaborative groups began practicing content analysis and synthesis together.

The movement in Egypt was said to be “very dependent on Facebook,” according to an Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah who was quoted in the Washington Post. Fueled by the anger over high food prices and high unemployment, the citizen’s communications strategy went beyond social media.

Collective Intelligence expert, Don Tapscott, wrote in HuffPo about Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s attempt to maintain a “firm grip” on the country’s media, which was ultimately lost due to the “interactive and decentralized” power of the web.

ReadWriteWeb noted that even when 90% of Egyptian internet access points were shut down by major ISPs, the coordination of “old-style” dial up connections helped maintain communications throughout the country.

Governments, companies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are figuring out how to engage citizens in “civic problem solving”. The aim is to derive beneficial strategies, tactics and paradigms that might ameliorate the threats facing the planet and future generations. According to Doug Schuler of the Public Sphere Project, this involves “civic intelligence”, which is a means of bettering society as a whole through interaction, learning, and maintaining knowledge about the world and our place within it.

Business sustainability and collective intelligence

Research in the natural and social sciences has shown this conception to be too narrow. Intelligence is a property of collectives. For the purposes of this paper, one takes a collective to be some entity distinguished as being non-atomic. Ant colonies, swarms, flocks or herds are examples among the non-human animals. Collectives of people may exhibit superior problem-solving capabilities than any of their most intelligent members. Even individual intelligence may be conceived as the intelligence of the collective of neurons that constitute one person’s brain.

Jamais Cascio, affiliate at the Institute for the Future and a senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, writes of how we’ll need to get smarter as a species if we are to survive the next several decades. But this time, he adds, “we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence.”

He turns our attention to breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, as means for “intelligence augmentation,” or what he calls “You+.” This form of “technological evolution” has more to do with how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge rather than responding to the physical world.

“We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds. As that epoch draws closer, the world is becoming a very different place.”